The UK regulator has proposed five ‘controlled function holders’ for insurers without including a chief investment officer. But the role is too important to overlook, says Scott Eason of Barnett Waddingham

French equity derivatives specialist Horizon Software is concerned about burdensome EU regulation choking liquidity in its core stock options market – but, says Sylvain Thieullent, its chief executive of electronic trading, the firm has learnt the importance of tailoring its approach to suit a local market as a result

Hampered by increasingly complex regulations, as well as the cost and inertia of inefficient legacy systems, banks are facing growing competition from innovative non-bank organisations. Unless they start to confront the mission-critical importance of transforming their technology, could they face death by a thousand cuts?

Day-ahead power market coupling has been in operation across the North West Europe region for over a year. To what extent has it helped prices converge, and what are the next steps aimed at bringing Europe’s electricity markets closer together?

Swiss bank regulators earned a reputation for conservatism – even among their peers – by quickly adopting a reinforced version of Basel III. But that was then, and Switzerland now needs to catch up on some issues, notably the leverage ratio, says Mark Branson, chief executive of the country’s prudential regulator

Failing to adopt a scaling methodology when including external data in operational risk calculations could lead to a distortion of capital charges and possibly systemic risk in a banking system relying on consortium data. Here, Roberto Torresetti and Claudio Nordio propose a scaling methodology to help overcome these shortcomings and compare the outcome with respect to alternative methodologies on a real operational data sample

The world’s big dealers quietly started work on a new swaps market utility last year, dubbed Project Colin. The aim was to control the vast collateral flows arising from incoming bilateral margining rules, but the consortium has since fallen apart, and a coalition of middleware and back-office firms have stepped into the breach